mr. openai I don’t feel so good
Metadata
Highlights
- I have never published anything under a FOSS license. Don’t get me wrong here – I’ve given money to open source projects, done some non-coding stuff, filed issues… I do believe in the thing, the heritage of the part of computers that came from acid-dropping academe rather than grindset. I can fairly say I don’t publish code because of my employer’s ridiculous policies9, but there’s something else as well. Automatic licensing, automatic permission, that’s what you need for industry scale, web scale, planet scale. But I like to get emails from other weirdos asking how things were done, to write back with cheerful comments. I like the inefficiency of it. I like how no one arrives in my inbox with Demands, only ever the beginning of a social interaction. (View Highlight)
New highlights added June 9, 2023 at 6:37 PM
mr. openai I don’t feel so good
Feb 14, 2023 internet Maya Kate she/her
techie scum. enthusiasm enthusiast. æsthete.
kixiQu Ms. e 
STEAL
This is about kind of techie things, but the real center of this post is feelings. I can only speak for myself. I’m sharing them because I don’t think I’m particularly special, so I’m guessing bits of this will sound familiar to other people like me1. Some of this is still fairly inchoate and I’ll probably return to it somewhere.
When I was a kid on the Internet I felt intense indignation about copy protection. The way certain websites would override right-click, give you a pop up instead so you couldn’t easily save images. I’d insist on finding workarounds to save the things anyway, little pixel witch gifs, to folders from which they’d never be used. Who do you think you are to send bytes to my computer but then try to tell me what to do with them? A webpage felt like a document sent in the mail. Maybe you should be able to sue me if I sell some copy, some collage of it, but you can’t stop me from making the copy, the collage. DVD players that blocked screenshots were an indignity I couldn’t get around, and I fumed.
Now we live in a world where if you share a copy of an illustration hi-res enough to look good on people’s screens, it’ll be on an Aliexpress product as soon as it gets enough likes. Twitter bots looking for “I want this on a t-shirt” to swoop in and automate a dropshipped version.
I have to have a more complicated view about that feeble attempt to protect against image theft in that context. It’s why I never put the illustrations I was putting up on Instagram onto Pixelfed; sensible open APIs make it that much easier for some misguided individual2 to vacuum up everything you’ve put out there. I felt uncomfortable with that even as my discomfort seemed to contradict other of my values3. Nuance, maturing opinions…
And yet I have 25 lines of indignant JavaScript tucked into a Tampermonkey script because Library Ireland tried to stop me from copying a quote out from their site and How Dare They.
Writing about the web often takes as axiomatic that everyone wants attention online, and more attention is more better and we’re all supposed to Have A Platform and Use Our Platform. I have a social acquaintance with other people who have had their writing land on the front page of Hacker News, some of whom routinely have their writing there, and maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that having The Hacker News Community™️ tack a comment section you can’t moderate onto the thing you made isn’t something everyone always loves. This is a part of hypertext where the rubber hits the road, maybe. The freedom to link is the power to brigade.
The “immortal programming goddess” who checks for an incoming Hacker News referer header and redirects to a fart noise: heroic, iconic, we have no choice but to etc. etc.
The people who have less alloyed feelings about seeking attention are the ones trying to make a living selling something. I see people – artists selling prints and stickers, ceramicists, embroiderers – bemoan “the algorithm”, the platforms’ recommendation systems that mediate4 the presentation of their photo and video content. What is it that we are meant to contrast the presence of the all-powerful uncaring algorithm to? The past? Uncomfortable to note, but common to see: guides by and for these folks that advise doing little to none of the traditional marketing work that would have been necessary to their livelihoods before social media. Is the algorithm bad for “taking away” attention from them that they’d never have had in a pre-social media world?
No, this kind of exculpatory line of thought misses a lot of what’s really bad about the status quo by distracting you with a question of entitlement. Better to consider it together with gig work. These artists operate with supposed flexibility and autonomy, but then have to create reels based on rumored understandings of how Instagram will continue directing attention to their posts, their profiles, their sale announcements. These livelihoods entail having to pretend that your boss is not your boss, that you don’t have a boss, that you’re your own boss, and you post about being your own boss sometimes because#smallbusinesslife does okay numbers, but also what cadence do you need to be uploading on and do you have to use the app’s own camera and video editor for it to count? Someone says that they heard from someone who knows a Facebook employee that it works in such-and-such a way, but that was before the update six months ago that everyone remembers for tanking their engagement, their finances, so maybe it doesn’t work that (View Highlight)- Now we live in a world where if you share a copy of an illustration hi-res enough to look good on people’s screens, it’ll be on an Aliexpress product as soon as it gets enough likes. Twitter bots looking for “I want this on a t-shirt” to swoop in and automate a dropshipped version.
I have to have a more complicated view about that feeble attempt to protect against image theft in that context. It’s why I never put the illustrations I was putting up on Instagram onto Pixelfed; sensible open APIs make it that much easier for some misguided individual2 to vacuum up everything you’ve put out there. (View Highlight)
- No, this kind of exculpatory line of thought misses a lot of what’s really bad about the status quo by distracting you with a question of entitlement. Better to consider it together with gig work. These artists operate with supposed flexibility and autonomy, but then have to create reels based on rumored understandings of how Instagram will continue directing attention to their posts, their profiles, their sale announcements. These livelihoods entail having to pretend that your boss is not your boss, that you don’t have a boss, that you’re your own boss, and you post about being your own boss sometimes because#smallbusinesslife does okay numbers, but also what cadence do you need to be uploading on and do you have to use the app’s own camera and video editor for it to count? (View Highlight)
- I don’t participate in getting my music from TikTok and Instagram, but the world of music that is available for me to listen to is different because we live in a TikTokified world. Because TikTok and Instagram have a recommendation model that uses choice of background music as a big factor in recommendations. Virality casts a long shadow. (View Highlight)
mr. openai I don’t feel so good
Metadata
Highlights
-
mr. openai I don’t feel so good
Feb 14, 2023 internet Maya Kate she/her
techie scum. enthusiasm enthusiast. æsthete.
kixiQu Ms. e
STEAL
This is about kind of techie things, but the real center of this post is feelings. I can only speak for myself. I’m sharing them because I don’t think I’m particularly special, so I’m guessing bits of this will sound familiar to other people like me1. Some of this is still fairly inchoate and I’ll probably return to it somewhere.
When I was a kid on the Internet I felt intense indignation about copy protection. The way certain websites would override right-click, give you a pop up instead so you couldn’t easily save images. I’d insist on finding workarounds to save the things anyway, little pixel witch gifs, to folders from which they’d never be used. Who do you think you are to send bytes to my computer but then try to tell me what to do with them? A webpage felt like a document sent in the mail. Maybe you should be able to sue me if I sell some copy, some collage of it, but you can’t stop me from making the copy, the collage. DVD players that blocked screenshots were an indignity I couldn’t get around, and I fumed.
Now we live in a world where if you share a copy of an illustration hi-res enough to look good on people’s screens, it’ll be on an Aliexpress product as soon as it gets enough likes. Twitter bots looking for “I want this on a t-shirt” to swoop in and automate a dropshipped version.
I have to have a more complicated view about that feeble attempt to protect against image theft in that context. It’s why I never put the illustrations I was putting up on Instagram onto Pixelfed; sensible open APIs make it that much easier for some misguided individual2 to vacuum up everything you’ve put out there. I felt uncomfortable with that even as my discomfort seemed to contradict other of my values3. Nuance, maturing opinions…
And yet I have 25 lines of indignant JavaScript tucked into a Tampermonkey script because Library Ireland tried to stop me from copying a quote out from their site and How Dare They.
Writing about the web often takes as axiomatic that everyone wants attention online, and more attention is more better and we’re all supposed to Have A Platform and Use Our Platform. I have a social acquaintance with other people who have had their writing land on the front page of Hacker News, some of whom routinely have their writing there, and maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that having The Hacker News Community™️ tack a comment section you can’t moderate onto the thing you made isn’t something everyone always loves. This is a part of hypertext where the rubber hits the road, maybe. The freedom to link is the power to brigade.
The “immortal programming goddess” who checks for an incoming Hacker News referer header and redirects to a fart noise: heroic, iconic, we have no choice but to etc. etc.
The people who have less alloyed feelings about seeking attention are the ones trying to make a living selling something. I see people – artists selling prints and stickers, ceramicists, embroiderers – bemoan “the algorithm”, the platforms’ recommendation systems that mediate4 the presentation of their photo and video content. What is it that we are meant to contrast the presence of the all-powerful uncaring algorithm to? The past? Uncomfortable to note, but common to see: guides by and for these folks that advise doing little to none of the traditional marketing work that would have been necessary to their livelihoods before social media. Is the algorithm bad for “taking away” attention from them that they’d never have had in a pre-social media world?
No, this kind of exculpatory line of thought misses a lot of what’s really bad about the status quo by distracting you with a question of entitlement. Better to consider it together with gig work. These artists operate with supposed flexibility and autonomy, but then have to create reels based on rumored understandings of how Instagram will continue directing attention to their posts, their profiles, their sale announcements. These livelihoods entail having to pretend that your boss is not your boss, that you don’t have a boss, that you’re your own boss, and you post about being your own boss sometimes because#smallbusinesslife does okay numbers, but also what cadence do you need to be uploading on and do you have to use the app’s own camera and video editor for it to count? Someone says that they heard from someone who knows a Facebook employee that it works in such-and-such a way, but that was before the update six months ago that everyone remembers for tanking their engagement, their finances, so maybe it doesn’t work that (View Highlight)
- Now we live in a world where if you share a copy of an illustration hi-res enough to look good on people’s screens, it’ll be on an Aliexpress product as soon as it gets enough likes. Twitter bots looking for “I want this on a t-shirt” to swoop in and automate a dropshipped version.
I have to have a more complicated view about that feeble attempt to protect against image theft in that context. It’s why I never put the illustrations I was putting up on Instagram onto Pixelfed; sensible open APIs make it that much easier for some misguided individual2 to vacuum up everything you’ve put out there. (View Highlight)
- No, this kind of exculpatory line of thought misses a lot of what’s really bad about the status quo by distracting you with a question of entitlement. Better to consider it together with gig work. These artists operate with supposed flexibility and autonomy, but then have to create reels based on rumored understandings of how Instagram will continue directing attention to their posts, their profiles, their sale announcements. These livelihoods entail having to pretend that your boss is not your boss, that you don’t have a boss, that you’re your own boss, and you post about being your own boss sometimes because#smallbusinesslife does okay numbers, but also what cadence do you need to be uploading on and do you have to use the app’s own camera and video editor for it to count? (View Highlight)
- I don’t participate in getting my music from TikTok and Instagram, but the world of music that is available for me to listen to is different because we live in a TikTokified world. Because TikTok and Instagram have a recommendation model that uses choice of background music as a big factor in recommendations. Virality casts a long shadow. (View Highlight)
- I have never published anything under a FOSS license. Don’t get me wrong here – I’ve given money to open source projects, done some non-coding stuff, filed issues… I do believe in the thing, the heritage of the part of computers that came from acid-dropping academe rather than grindset. I can fairly say I don’t publish code because of my employer’s ridiculous policies9, but there’s something else as well. Automatic licensing, automatic permission, that’s what you need for industry scale, web scale, planet scale. But I like to get emails from other weirdos asking how things were done, to write back with cheerful comments. I like the inefficiency of it. I like how no one arrives in my inbox with Demands, only ever the beginning of a social interaction. (View Highlight)